Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  ‘My grace at the table,’ says Bjørnar, ‘when at home we are eating fish that I have caught, is always this: “Fuck! We don’t know how lucky we are!”‘

  After each haul of fish, Bjørnar lowers the lines again. Once they are down he takes a red-handled knife from the magnetic strip, pulls each fish out with a hooked finger in its under-gills, turns the fish on its back, and with a quick jerk and slash cuts its throat and breaks its neck at the same time. Blood dribbles on to the deck beneath the trough.

  ‘That’s a sharp knife, Bjørnar.’

  He looks at it as if it were a stick.

  ‘This is not a sharp knife. Later you will see a sharp knife.’

  Kittiwakes, fulmars, black-backs picking up the scraps. Creak of the winch, slosh of the scuppers as Bjørnar hoses the deck clear of blood.

  A cod comes up among the saithe: malty-brown dotted flanks, barbels, snow-white belly.

  ‘You should have seen the cod in the wintertime. They make these saithe look like sardines. They have just gone this fortnight. My eldest son is following them to North Cape right now. I had one this year – thirty-two kilograms!’

  The gaff is now red with blood, gobbeted with flesh. A curious fish comes up, slender of body, with large iridescent scales that rainbow in the sunlight, and wide, flat eyeballs. In the sunlight its pupils, adjusted to the dark of the depths, have dilated to the size of bottle caps.

  ‘A beautiful fish, no?’ says Bjørnar. He does not say its name. He shakes it off the gaff onto a metal tray. Its upwards eye has been burst by the hook, and as I watch it slowly fills with ruby blood. With its rainbow scales and jewelled eye, it resembles a Fabergé model that might spring into clockwork life.

  My mind is pulled northwards to the Svalbard archipelago, 100 miles beyond our wallowing boat, where the Global Seed Vault has been constructed: a billion-dollar storage site sunk beneath the permafrost for the preservation of biodiversity, readying for a future in which variety has been depleted by extinction and genetic modification. I think of the seismic charges detonating underwater, of the oil ships dropping their drills to the seabed, of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and of our species’ instinct to open what has been sealed without thought for the consequences.

  ‘Let’s go home and eat!’ says Bjørnar after we have caught thirty fish or so. He revs the engine, pulls the boat’s nose around, and with a chuckle of contentment sets course for the Andenes lighthouse.

  ~

  We moor up back at the dock. It is cold in the shadow of the deckhouse. Oil rainbows the water around the boat.

  ‘This is a sharp knife,’ says Bjørnar, prising a yellow-handled knife from the magnetic strip.

  He reaches into the vat, takes a fish by its tail, slaps it down onto a wooden board criss-crossed with knife scars. He hooks a finger into the gills to hold the fish steady, then cuts down from the head in a filleting stroke along the flank. He seems barely to lean in with the knife, more just to place it – and the flesh falls away out of respect for the blade’s edge. Down and along to the tail, flip the fish, repeat on the reverse. Flip the fillet, strip the skin, peel and rip. Yellowish-white flesh, soft as putty, faintly translucent. Head and skeleton into the harbour, fillet into a bucket of water.

  A man in a hat with furred ear-flaps walks down the gangplank, stops by the boat, nods to Bjørnar, looks me over.

  ‘Aha! This is Sven,’ says Bjørnar. ‘An old friend. We’ve fished together many times.’

  They talk as Bjørnar works: about the fishing, the prospect of the seismic blasting starting up again, and the cod’s recent departure north to Finnmark.

  ‘I will follow the cod tomorrow,’ says Sven. ‘I will be perhaps two, three weeks away? I still have quota. Maybe I will look for lumpfish also.’

  Lumpfish are caught for their roe, a cheap caviar. They are cut open and the red roe is scraped out.

  ‘I always make sure to cut the throats of the lumpfish before I take their roe out,’ says Sven modestly, as if confessing a substantial charitable donation.

  ‘Some “environmentalists” say we shouldn’t kill the lumpfish for its roe,’ he continues. ‘But the rest of the fish is not for eating. Just two patches of meat on its cheeks – so we take the roe, cut out the cheeks, and return the rest of the fish to the system of the sea. It feeds that system. They don’t understand that the sea needs feeding, just like us.’

  Bjørnar grunts. ‘I expect to be returned – how do you say, in my next life – as a lumpfish. So I always cut their throats before I take their roe, just as I would like to have my own throat cut before I have my roe taken.’

  ‘Do as you would be done by,’ I say. ‘The golden rule of reincarnation.’

  ~

  Early that afternoon we eat saithe with butter and potatoes while the cat with lizard eyes watches us from a corner. Ingrid ladles the chunks of saithe from pot to plate. Bjørnar thumps the table with both fists, and says grace: ‘Hell! Thank you for the fish in the pot!’

  ‘That’s a more polite version of grace than the one you quoted in the boat,’ I say.

  Bjørnar laughs and thumps the table again. ‘One language for sea, another for land!’

  After lunch, Bjørnar takes me around the island. He wears his raccoon hat again, and we carry the Wehrmacht binoculars with us. As Bjørnar drives and talks, I begin to understand something of the ancient and contemporary complexities of Andøya. Ecologically, it is an island of four zones: peaks, peat, marsh, beach. The glaciers have bulldozed it flat on its east side, but left it mountainous on its west. Much of the island is open to all-comers, but other areas are controlled by NATO, enclosed in high perimeter fences. I am strongly reminded of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides: the peat, the remoteness, the openness – and the same attractive potential for industrial exploitation and military colonization.

  ‘You know, Rob,’ says Bjørnar as we bump down a side track on the west coast of the island, ‘if there is a blowout at one of these proposed rigs, well, it will destroy this coastline. The Gulf Stream is pumping in and out of all the fjords. The oil is going to be spread everywhere. A blowout at Lofoten will spread oil all the way north across here and up to Finnmark County. The Gulf Stream will be the oil’s conveyor belt.’

  What Bjørnar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia’, the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’. Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales when he realized that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible. Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the Anthropocene – we might consider John Clare a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native Northamptonshire countryside disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has certainly flourished recently. ‘Worldwide, there is an increase in ecosystem distress syndromes,’ wrote Albrecht in an early paper on the subject, ‘matched by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes.’ Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home become unhomely around its inhabitants.

  Bjørnar spots a sea eagle on the shore. The side track takes us closer to it. We drive slowly past a row of wooden houses near the beach. I watch the eagle through binoculars. It is perched on a kelpy boulder. Its four-foot wings hang around it like an oversized cloak.

  There is movement from one of the houses. A finger twitches back a curtain and a face looks anxiously out at us.

  ‘Why does that man look at us like that?’ Bjørnar asks, puzzled.

  ‘Bjørnar, I’ve read enough Scandinavian crime
fiction to know that we are behaving quite a lot like murderers. Two men in a big black car and dark glasses, one wearing a dead raccoon on his head, the other scanning lonely houses through a pair of binoculars. That person should be forgiven for feeling worried.’

  The booming laugh again. ‘You are a good man, Rob.’ He drives on. The face at the window disappears.

  Blue hues to the snow now. A wooden swing on a beach shifts in the wind. Purple shadows creep over eastern peaks. Sea eagles pluck a dark carcass far out on a frozen lake.

  ~

  In the days that follow, a northerly wind builds. We are unable to go out fishing, so I take to climbing in the mountains on the west of Andøya, then returning to Bjørnar’s house in the afternoons and evenings.

  The weather stays clear. The days blaze with metal light: silver off the snow, gold in the sun, iron in the shadows. Star-filled nights freeze the snow hard. It is -10°C in the forests at noon. The wind makes moving cyclones of snow grains, far bigger than any I have seen in Scotland or the Alps. They roam the windward slopes of Andøya’s peaks. Some are hundreds of feet high. I watch them across the valleys, abruptly changing direction and speed, their tops whipping around like trees in the wind.

  One day I ski up a valley over deep snow, through scrubby birch woods to the base of a mountain shoulder. I stash the skis and continue on foot, punching through the crust with each pace. It is difficult, exciting going. The snow holds an archive of print trails: snow hare, fox, raven. The wind rattles my skin, presses on my eyes. A fifty-foot snow-devil wanders towards me, hits me with a hiss that rises to a crackling roar, then roams off across the slope in silence. I feel as if I have been passed through by a ghost. On the plateau the wind has sculpted extraordinary structures in the snow. Rime ice grows in feathers on boulders. Cloud shadows slip over peaks to the west. A raptor hunts the birch woods below me in the valley. It is one of the most pristine places I have ever been, though I know this to be an illusion. I sit in the lee of a crag, grateful for its wind-shadow.

  Returning across the plateau, I meet and follow the line of my own outward footprints. The wind has already whittled away the loose snow around my prints so that they are starting to stand out from the snow – as if time were reversing, and what was pressed down below the surface is now rising up.

  That afternoon I go down to one of the beaches on the north-west of Andøya. A skerry shaped like the dorsal fin of a shark stands a few hundred yards offshore. Hundreds of seabirds wheel around it. It is low tide, and the sand of the bay is strewn with jetsam, almost all of it plastic. Here, as in the Lofotens, the density of human debris is shocking. Fishing buoys, toothbrushes, bleach bottles, tangled fishing nets, thousands of unidentifiable shards.

  I feel sick as I walk the wrack-line and its litter, appalled by the contrast with the plateau, implicated by my part in the scene. This was once all oil too. Oil – the ‘monstrous transformer’ – is in all of these things, vital to the manufacture of the plastics that we first synthesized only a century ago. I think of the photographs I have seen recently of hermit crabs on the remote Pacific atoll of Henderson Island; one crab had taken a plastic doll’s head as its shell, another an empty tub of Avon night cream. Plastic is the substance that has served as our most perfect container – and that now overwhelms our systems of containment. The substances we have made are relentlessly accumulating around us, forming a very present past. Over the last two centuries, and especially the last fifty years, our mass production, consumption and disposal has created ‘an empire of things’ with its own unruly material afterlife, ‘a swelling topography of scrapped modernity’, as Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen write, ‘which despite ever more effective regimes of disposal is increasingly confronting us with its pestering presence’. Nuclear waste waits in vitrified flasks for the underground tombs into which it might be buried. Seas and coasts thicken with plastic trash. Carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere. I recall Don DeLillo’s laconic, lethal one-liner from his novel Underworld: ‘What we excrete comes back to consume us.’

  These surging, multifarious substances of the Anthropocene are what Timothy Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’: entities that are impossible for us to perceive in their dispersed, ‘viscous’ entirety, and of which we find it hard to speak. Our accumulative activities have even produced a new type of rock called ‘plastiglomerate’ – a hard coagulate that contains sand grain, shells, wood and seaweed, all held together by molten plastic produced by the human burning of beach rubbish on campfires. Plastiglomerate was first identified by geologists on Kamilo Beach in Hawaii; it has been proposed – due to its durability and distinctive composition – as a plausible future Anthropocene strata horizon marker. Plastiglomerate is surely an emblematic substance of our epoch. It is made by a stickiness that picks up and coagulates other entities, it is born of an untimely new geology that practises a kind of sampling and remixing, and it holds both the natural and the synthetic in grotesque hybridity.

  Perhaps stickiness is one of the defining experiences of the Anthropocene as it is lived, I think there on the beach. Each of us is implicated in the effects of the epoch, each of us an author of its making and its legacies. In the Anthropocene we cannot easily keep nature at a distance, holding it at arm’s length for adoration or inspection. Nature is no longer only a remote peak shining in the sun, or a raptor hunting over birch woods – it is also tidelines thickened with drift plastic, or methane clathrates decomposing over millions of square miles of warming permafrost. This new nature entangles us in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. As with the sticky strands of self-tightening silken plastic that drift down from the helicopters of the ‘New People’ at the end of John Wyndham’s premonitory novel The Chrysalids (1955) – originally titled A Time for Change – the more we struggle to distance ourselves from the Anthropocene, the more stuck we become.

  ~

  ‘Come, Robert, we will walk together one more time, it is your turn to sit in the throne!’

  Good Friday on Andøya: my last day with Ingrid and Bjørnar. We have all eaten together: cod’s tongues, cod steaks, saithe fillets, big pink-skinned potatoes that you peel on the fork.

  We walk down to the shore, treading carefully on the sheet ice that lies over the sloping fields, placing our feet full and flat. The wind from the north is flayingly cold. It bites my ankles, burns my shins. Our breath is steel wool.

  At the water’s edge stands the driftwood throne. By its side a small standing stone has been raised and set deep into the ground.

  ‘My god is the god of stone,’ Bjørnar says with a quiet smile. ‘I don’t need any other god.’

  Then he roars again, bellowing with laughter and patting the arm of the throne.

  ‘Come! Macfarlane! Sit here and be King of Andøya for a few minutes!’

  The throne’s legs and back are made of birch trunks as thick as my wrist. Its back and base are nailed racks of driftwood, stripped of their bark. Its arms are two limbs of driftwood. It is perhaps eight feet high and its seat is four feet off the ground. It is a chair you mountaineer into.

  I sit in the throne, and look across the fjord. There is a cheeping and a whirr of white wings – a blizzard of snow buntings flies past us and over the waves.

  ‘This is where I leave the fish for the eagles,’ Bjørnar says, pointing to the rocks in front of the throne. ‘And when the killer whales come, we see them in the near channel. They are moving between one hunting ground and another, always very sure of where they are going.’

  Just along the shore from the throne is a rusting vertical pipe, sticking six feet up out of the shoreline. Three plastic bottles are beached by it.

  ‘What is that, Bjørnar?’ I ask.

  Suddenly he seems tired, sad. His eyes are rheumy. He works his jaws silently, as if they have become stuck together, his mouth gummed up. He does not answer, then says quietly – as though he has not told me before, as if he is saying it to himself or to the wind – ‘They blasted for th
ree years, and I fought them for three years. Now they are coming back. It is all returning.’

  Then he says, ‘Enough, Rob. We need to go no further. It is too cold.’

  We walk carefully over the icy fields to the house.

  That afternoon I play with baby Sigrid, bouncing her on my knee while I hum the William Tell overture and ‘Bye, Baby Bunting’. She is very bonny and her eyes are pale blue.

  Before I leave, I help move a massage chair that Bjørnar’s son has brought for him, salvaged from a skip. We haul it out of the car and into the basement of the house. It is very heavy, made of black leather, and has a hand-held controller with multiple settings for the optimal relaxation of different muscle groups.

  ‘It will be good for his back,’ says Ingrid, kindly.

  10

  The Blue of Time

  (Kulusuk, Greenland)

  Late summer off the coast of Kulusuk Island, south-east Greenland, and a single iceberg sweats in the channel. The berg is vast, perhaps 100 feet from sea to summit, shaped like a mainsail with a rounded tip. It glistens white as wet wax. Its submerged bulk shows as a bottle-green aura.

  Dark blue of the channel, sharp blue of the cloudless sky. Daytime moon above a shield-shaped mountain. On the far side of the channel, a glacier runs down to the water, six miles or so distant, the cliff of the calving face faintly visible.